Legends of the Ukrainian Cossacks: 25 Heroic Tales of the Zaporizhian Sich: Freedom, Brotherhood, and Unbreakable Spirit (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798254481447)

Before there was an army, there was the Sich.

On an island in the middle of the Dnieper, runaway serfs and outlaws built a fortress. They had no king, no lord, no master. They elected their own leaders, fought their own wars, and answered to no one. When the Ottoman Sultan demanded their surrender, they wrote him a letter so savage it became the most famous insult in European history.

They called themselves Cossacks - free men.

These 25 legends are the stories Ukrainians have told about them for centuries. Not the sanitized fairy tales you find in most collections, but the raw, vivid, sometimes brutal oral tradition recorded by ethnographer Dmytro Yavornytsky from the last people who still remembered. Stories of the first oath sworn on Khortytsia island. Of Baida, the prince who traded his palaces for a life on the steppe - and paid for it on a hook in Istanbul. Of Ivan Sirko, who rode into battle seventy times and never lost. Of the blind kobzar poets who kept singing the Cossack memory long after the Russian Empire burned the Sich to the ground.

There is a line in the Ukrainian national anthem: "We will show that we are of the Cossack nation."

These are the stories behind that line.

Includes a historical introduction to the Cossack era and a glossary of Ukrainian terms.

Author: Liudmyla Pytel,Mountain Mill Editorial
ISBN-13: 9798254481447
Publisher: Independently Published
Language: English
Published: 04/01/2026
Pages: 134
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.42lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.29d